Who Was That Guy?

Donald Trump reminds me of some New York Mets fans that I encountered in 1986 at the AstroDome. The Mets were playing the Astros in the playoffs that year. It was a sellout crowd, all Astros fans, except for five drunk guys from Queens who were sitting in front of me. These guys were loud, vulgar and shameless.

But what really impressed about these nasty Mets fans from Queens was their courage, because we were in Houston, Texas, in the presence of over 50,000 screaming Texan baseball fans. Five against 50,000 -- the Mets fans screamed like donkeys anyway..

So you think you don't want anything to do with guys like this, but what if it was 1942 and you were in Casablanca sitting with Rick at his cafe and the Nazis swagger in. Then you want the nasty Mets fans to be there, to be on our side.

The Mets beat Boston in the World Series that year. I still hate them.

Rick, as you all know, came from Brooklyn. He had a borderline contempt for Queens folk.

Secretary. I had a good meeting with Anita, the outgoing secretary of the Santa Barbara Kiwanis Club. We worked our way through the procedures. She explained them one by one. Then I repeated the explanation back to her to indicate that I understood. By this process we worked through all the steps, and that took one hour. She said she was impressed that I had learned so quickly, but I reminded her that we would have to do this all over again.....that repetition was necessary.

She expects to become President of the club, but she cannot serve well unless a competent person takes over as secretary, and that would be me. It seems that we work well together.

Somerset Maugham. Somerset Maugham was an intelligent and entertaining author. I am on page 209 of his great work Of Human Bondage. Philip, the main character, has come to Paris as a young man to live his life and study art. He falls under the sway of Cronshaw, an old drunken poet, who gives him this bit of advice --

Philip asks, "Have you ever done anything you regret?"

"How can I regret when what I did was inevitable," asked Cronshaw in return.

"But that is fatalism."

"The illusion which man has that his will is free is so deeply rooted that I am ready to accept it. I act as though I were a free agent. But when an action is performed it is clear that all the forces of the universe from all eternity conspired to cause it, and nothing I could do could have prevented it. If it was good I can claim no merit; if it was bad I can accept no censure."

"My brain reels," said Philip.

"Have some whiskey," returned Cronshaw.

Reading this I realized that Cronshow, the drunken poet, got this nugget from Baruch Spinoza, the Jewish-Dutch philosopher -- that much is obvious. Spinoza believed that God did no favors, that prayer was useless, but to understand God and Nature through the use of reason led to clarity and happiness.

Anyway, the book is plot-driven and far from philosophical except in the truth of this -- that a young man away from home, living his life, studying art in Paris, will seriously ponder deep questions that hardly concern the rest of us.

Hollywood Dumps Trump. It's not like I know a lot of people in the business, but it would not surprise anyone that they all dump on Trump. This cinematic mogul -- you could look her up on imdb.com if I gave you her name -- said:
"God, I can't stand Donald Trump....It doesn't matter what magazine I pick up, what paper I read, or what station I switch to, he's always staring at me, yammering on and on about something or someone. I have read everything he says and everything that's written about him, and still, I have never felt this much disdain for a candidate before. It hurts my head and my heart and it's only May."

Outtakes

The Internet was the solution to a problem we did not have.

The most important domestic problem is student loan debt. It should be forgiven and restructured. We should do this for our young people.

The least important domestic issue is bathroom access. Let's kick that can down the road and talk about it after we get a new President in 2017.

If Donald Trump wins I am going to Mexico. Everybody else is going to Canada and I don't run with that crowd.

Mrs. Clinton says she is not good at politics. I agree. So why is she running for President? I mean, it is a job that requires political talent, which she does not have, as she admits.

Yet I remain a Clinton voter by default.

Thank you.

Frog Hospital is Free. Frog Hospital is free and hundred of readers have enjoyed reading 25 issues every year since 1998. but if you really insist on paying for a subscription, then you will be remembered in the editor's bedtime prayers.

To subscribe, you must go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your contribution of $25 or $50. Or mail a check for $25 or $50 to Fred Owens
1105 Veronica Springs RD Santa Barbara, CA 93105

thank you very much

Of Human Bondage

But first the news:

Politics. Donald Trump and I have a lot in common, except I'm not rich, or mean, or crazy. Trump will be 70 on June 14, I will be 70 on June 25, so we are just the same age. But in other ways we are a lot different. I like to read books. He likes to build golf courses.... I wonder if he actually plays golf?
He says he only sleeps three hours a day. Good for him. I sleep eight hours plus an afternoon nap.
Otherwise, he's a human being like me and we live in the same country.
Headlines. Trump can get a headline anytime he wants. I was half-listening to his interview on Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos who was pressing him to reveal his income taxes. Trump said, "It's None of Your Business." I heard him say that -- it's none of your business -- and I knew that  bingo! he had just gotten himself another headline.
The New York Times dutifully wrote the front-page headline that Trump said, "It's None of Your Business."
So Trump marches on and I heard that recent polls show him ahead of Hillary Clinton in Ohio.
I have to check up on this. I have some friends in Columbus, Ohio, all ardent Democrats, and they read this newsletter. Hey fellas, is Trump gonna take Ohio?
Of Human Bondage. I'm on page 23 of this great novel by Somerset Maugham. He is a plot-driven writer. That's how he can get away with poor sentences like "It was a week later."

A lot of writers would try to smooth that out. But Maugham doesn't. He has a story to tell, so he just wrote that it was a week later  -- why try to be stylish?

I read a volume of his short stories this winter. Then I read the Painted Veil which was made into a 2006 movie starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.  Another good movie, The Razor's Edge, starred Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in 1946, also based on a Maugham novel.

Next Book. Hannah Arendt is best known for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her point was that Eichmann was quite an ordinary man and still capable of great evil.

But she has written on philosophy as well, so I checked out her two-volume work titled Thinking.  It's about thinking. I do a lot of thinking so I decided to read it.

Here's one sentence: "Aristotle's De Anima is full of tantalizing hints at psychic phenomena and their close interconnection with the body in contrast with the relation or, rather, non-relation between body and mind."

I don't understand what Arendt is saying in this book. I have made it to page 44 and it just keeps going, getting thicker and denser. The thing is -- I trust her and I believe she is not wasting my time, so I'm sticking it out.

Next Book. The next book is Consilience by E.O. Wilson. Wilson is the famous ant doctor. He knows from ants. That is his life's work. Isn't that the coolest thing in the world -- to be a bug doctor? He writes with authority on the social life of ants and humans. He explains the path of evolution, and he is so much easier to understand than Hannah Arendt.

Next Book. The next book has a very long title but it is quite an easy book to understand. It is called the Theological-Political Treatise  written in 1670 by Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch-Jewish philosopher.

You need to understand Spinoza because he was the foundation of Enlightenment thinking. Spinoza was the man who inspired the very non-religious thinking of our Founding Fathers. From Spinoza you get Thomas Jefferson.

God is Nature. Nature is God. Moses did not part the Red Sea, that is just a story. Jesus was a wise teacher but he did not rise from the dead.

Spinoza's thinking was very radical for the time, 1670, but he was fortunate to live in Holland, which tolerated this free thinker.

"Men should never be superstitious."  --- That is the opening sentence in the Preface to this work.

Next and Last Book. President Andrew Jackson got Zinn-ified and downgraded off the $20 bill  (Zinnified is where you get found out. Howard Zinn finds out that you were a bum and a tyrant and no hero whatsoever.)

Another statue gets torn down and so the mighty have been humbled. But I know so little about Andrew Jackson. He won the Battle of New Orleans after the war was over, and he drove the Indians out of the Old Dixie and over to Oklahoma.

There's to more to it, so I must read his history. I found a heavy 500-page volume with his stern visage on the cover. This would not be a good book to take to the beach. But next to it was a sweet and slender volume titled A Being So Gentle: the Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson.

This slim volume lies before me on the coffee table. It seems he had a wife.  I have not read it yet. It might be good.

With that I wish you a restful and pleasant weekend.

Spring Subscription Drive.  In a response to overwhelming demand, I have decided to keep Frog Hospital going for another year. I believe I have goods worthy of your reception. I do not write when the mood strikes me, I only write when I have something to say that you might find interesting.

This is quite a political year, so we will have lots of that.  And be ready for surprises. Can you learn? It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how experienced you are, it only matters if you can learn. Frog Hospital will be making many regrettable errors in the coming year -- because we are learning as we go.

Stay with us and please help us out with subscription dollars. This income keeps the editor from endorsing a cause or a movement. This income keeps the editor from getting preachy or self-righteous.

Go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your contribution of $25 or $50.

Or mail a check for $25 or $50 to

Fred Owens

1105 Veronica Springs RD

Santa Barbara, CA 93105

--

Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214

My gardening blog is  Fred Owens

My writing blog is Frog Hospital

Spending Time With Your Dog

We have a great story about spending time with your dog, but first we have to brush up on our Latin.

Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset. Cato wrote that 2,000 years ago. It means "Never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself."

You remember Cato. Cato was the old Roman statesman who was most famous for saying Carthago delenda est which means "Carthage must be destroyed." This saying was a successful bit of propaganda that Cato endlessly repeated until it caught on and became the chant of a mob and sure enough, the Romans destroyed Carthage.

Carthage is gone, or to be precise, it is now only a small village on the railroad line in Tunisia. But Rome is eternal and still with us -- thanks to Cato.

But the saying at the top here starts with NUMQUAM meaning never and you're never more active than when you are doing nothing -- what the heck does that mean? It's a bit of a puzzle, a puzzle that Hannah Arendt tackled in her volume of philosophy published in 1971 and titled "Thinking." Arendt is best remembered for her writing of "Eichmann in Jerusalem," but I found her thinking volume on the philosophy shelf at the library and I am checking it out.

Just keep this mind -- if you are sitting around the house all day in your pajamas and just thinking about stuff, you are making a valuable contribution to our culture and prosperity.

The Next Story Is About A Dog

Good, there is no more Latin in this week’s issue of Frog Hospital. The next story is by Bill Skubi, a friend of mine who lives in Coupeville, Washington. The story was originally published in the Puget Sound Mail in 1989 if you remember that obscure, quirky newspaper that I once published. The Puget Sound Mail promised “News of Lasting Value” and we kept that promise because this story about a man and his dog is not aged or dated.

Spending Time With Your Dog

By Bill Skubi

The frantic pace of modern life was catching up with me. I was taking a good hard look at the strange kind of person I had let myself become. This began a few weeks ago when Jan told me there was something wrong with Jackson’s ear. I was hearing what she said, but to my utter horror I realized that I didn’t care. Jackson is a lumbering old Yellow Lab. He has been my dog almost eleven years, slightly longer than I have been married to Jan. Just the week before I had caught myself actually trying to give him away to a friend who had moved his family into the country.

The excuse I gave myself was that Jackson was no longer happy living with us, since Jan insisted he be tied. The truth was that he was not happy because I had become too pre-occupied to spend any time with him. He was just this big, sad, obligatory maintenance retriever at the end of his tether. And so was I. That reminded me that it was I who had consciously fled the academic world fifteen years ago. At that point I realized that twenty years of schooling had trained me to read and write obscure sentences about “contingencies and non-linear variables.” At that rate I knew I would probably never live long enough to figure out what I wanted to say, and if I did figure that out, nobody would want to read it.

The writer in me wanted to git back home, do some plain talkin’, leave the footnotes, spend some evenings rocking on the front porch with a big ol’ hound-dog curled up at my feet. And I did it too, but the years brought marriage, a mortgage, and a child, along with career changes, and I let a whole new set of pressures come between me and my humanity. Or to put it another way, part of me woke up and was shocked to be sharing a body with someone who would offer to give away his dog. I really didn’t like the person I had become. I know I am basically an incurably selfish person. I attend church and take my marriage vows seriously knowing they are twin anchors on a spirit I know can be dangerously free, but I had forgotten that Jackson, too, was utterly dedicated to protecting me, and I owed him the same.

So I went to see what was ailing Jack’s ear. It was pretty sore all right, he was awful dirty and so was his house. I gave him a bath, and he was so proud to ride in my new truck and he didn’t even care he was going to the veterinarian. The vet had to keep him awhile to remove foxtail grass seeds from his ears. I went home, cleaned out his house and built him a new run in a place where he would have a good view of things. He was still a little wobbly on his hind legs from the medication when I brought him home. I showed him around his new digs and told him we would have to spend more time together. Then I noticed he was shaking uncontrollably.  At first I could not tell whether he was sick or reacting to the medication. Then I got down to where I could stroke him and discovered he was shaking from pure joy.

Philosophers and theologians will forever debate the highest possible achievement of man on Earth, and I would submit to them that being the object of such perfect love might be right up there.

Anyway, I bought a blanket at the thrift store for Jack to lie on in the truck. I can still be too busy to take him along, but we do have an understanding. And my young son asks a question that I remember asking, “Do dogs go to heaven when they die?” His mother isn’t sure how to answer. As for me, there have been times in my life when I have doubted whether or not heaven really exists, but I have never doubted that dogs would be there if it did.

Politics:  Can You Learn?

Trump is learning. He's getting better, not better-better just better at what he has been doing. That's the sign of a winner. Stephen Curry is not just the world's best basketball player, he's getting better. That's a good example. A bad example is an antibiotic resisting microbe in your local hospital. This microbe is evolving rapidly -- it is learning. How you fought it last week will not work today.

So the question goes to Hillary. Yes, she is smart. Everybody knows that, but is she learning?

Stay loose on your feet. Be ready for surprises. It doesn't matter how good you are. It only matters if you can learn.

Spring Subscription Drive.  In a response to overwhelming demand, I have decided to keep Frog Hospital going for another year. I believe I have goods worthy of your reception. I do not write when the mood strikes me, I only write when I have something to say that you might find interesting.

This is quite a political year, so we will have lots of that.  And be ready for surprises. Can you learn? It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how experienced you are, it only matters if you can learn. Frog Hospital will be making many regrettable errors in the coming year -- because we are learning as we go.

Stay with us and please help us out with subscription dollars. This income keeps the editor from endorsing a cause or a movement. This income keeps the editor from getting preachy or self-righteous.

Go to the Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button with your contribution of $25 or $50.

Or mail a check for $25 or $50 to

Fred Owens

1105 Veronica Springs RD

Santa Barbara, CA 93105